Thank you to everyone for the pointers in getting this working. Here's what I'm trying to solve:

I have about 500 text files from an old wiki. The file names are all numbers. I have a dump of from the mySQL database of the wiki, from which I extracted the descriptions of each file. I want to rename each file to it's corresponding description. For example I have file '2', which the description is 'Server Build'. I want to rename the files to their description so I can then import them into a new wiki. The new wiki has a import utility script which you can pass it a file name and a title, however it only accepts one file at time.

Thanks again everyone, I think have enough to get me going.